, I'm almost afraid to. What'll I do with that
child when it comes to be my turn? What'll Jimmie do? Buy her a string
of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How'll
I break it to my mother? That's the cheerful little echo in my
thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?"

Beulah flushed. Her serious brown eyes, deep brown with wine-colored
lights in them, met those of each of her friends in turn. Then she
laughed.

"Well, I do know this is funny," she said, "but, you know, I haven't
dared tell her. She'll be away for a month, anyway. Aunt Ann is here,
but I'm only telling her that I'm having a little girl from the
country to visit me."

Occasionally the architect of an apartment on the upper west side of
New York--by pure accident, it would seem, since the general run of
such apartments is so uncomfortable, and unfriendly--hits upon a plan
for a group of rooms that are at once graciously proportioned and
charmingly convenient, while not being an absolute offense to the eye
in respect to the details of their decoration. Beulah Page and her
mother lived in such an apartment, and they had managed with a few
ancestral household gods, and a good many carefully related modern
additions to them, to make of their eight rooms and bath, to say
nothing of the ubiquitous butler's-pantry, something very remarkably
resembling a home, in its most delightful connotation: and it was in
the drawing room of this home that the three girls were gathered.

Beulah, the younger daughter of a widowed mother--now visiting in the
home of the elder daughter, Beulah's sister Agatha, in the expectation
of what the Victorians refer to as an "interesting event"--was
technically under the chaperonage of her Aunt Ann, a solemn little
spinster with no control whatever over the movements of her determined
young niece.

Beulah was just out of college,--just out, in fact, of the most
high-minded of all the colleges for women;--that founded by Andrew
Rogers in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one. There
is probably a greater percentage of purposeful young women graduated
from Rogers College every year, than from any other one of the
communities of learning devoted to the education of women; and of all
the purposeful classes turned out from that admirable institution,
Beulah's class could without exaggeration be designated as the most
purposeful class of them all. That Beulah was not the most pu